SMS via Email

Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks? I was vaguely aware that it was possible to send an SMS via Email but I'd never had the need to do so up until today and so I'd never tried. However, being in Indonesia and using a local mobile phone network provider, I found that I wasn't able to send an SMS to Australia for whatever reason.

It was then that I read of the possibility of sending an SMS via Gmail provided one knew the SMS Gateway email address of the service provider associated with the phone number. To find the service provider, I used 160.com.au (the interface is shown in Figure 1):

Figure 1

Once I entered the number, I discovered that the service provider was Optus. It was then just a question of finding the SMS Gateway address of Optus. For this I used email2sms.info as shown in Figure 2:

As can be seen, there's no need for the international code prefix and there's a reminder to add a 0 when omitting this. I then sent my SMS/Email via Gmail and the message was sent. Currently I'm waiting for a reply.

POSTSCRIPT: this is the message I got back from Gmail at 11am today (Saturday 15th of September). The original email was sent on Friday, 14th September 2018 at 10:36:38 (Jakarta time +0700):

Gmail will try for a couple more days but I'd say that the message is not going to go through.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: as anticipated, it didn't make it. Ah well, so it goes.